The Margot Affair: A Novel by Sanaë Lemoine

The secret daughter of a French politician and a famous actress drops the startling revelation that will shatter her family, in this beguiling debut novel of intrigue and betrayal.

“There were so many of us, children of these double families who dreamed of the other side. That night, I fantasized about the separate spheres of our lives colliding…”

Margot Louve has lived her life as her parents’ secret. For seventeen years, her father—an influential French politician with presidential ambitions—has led a double life: his only contact with Margot and her mother conducted in hidden moments away from his wife and official duties.

In their small Parisian apartment on the Left Bank, Margot’s mother, Anouk—a prominent actress—fiercely guards the closed world of secrecy she has built around them. It is a house of cards that Margot, fueled by a longing to be seen and heard, decides to tumble.

That simmering summer, she meets the man who will set her plan in motion: a well-regarded journalist whose trust seems surprisingly easy to gain. But as Margot is drawn into an adult world she struggles to comprehend, she learns how one impulsive decision can change the contours of her world, and the lives of those around her, in ways she could never have imagined.

Stunningly exposing the seams between private lives and public faces, The Margot Affair is a novel of truth and deceit, desire and transgression. It introduces a searing new voice in literary fiction.

Sanaë Lemoine was born in Paris to a Japanese mother and French father, and raised in France and Australia. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and her MFA at Columbia University. She now lives in New York.